SEO

How to Earn Inbound Links

by SEO Savvy June 17th, 2014

Is there still a place for link building? The debate isn’t necessarily whether link building is alive or dead, but what links mean from a marketing standpoint. As with all aspects of SEO, link building has evolved. And as our efforts are refocused based on algorithm updates and industry evolution, we shift our gaze to link earning rather than link building.

What does this mean? Link building is still an important part of SEO, but in order to make the most of your inbound links, the focus, as always should be on quality rather than quantity.  Building a brand with a link earning approach is a more traditional method that, when done correctly, will naturally produce inbound links.

Link building has evolved, and diversifying your link building efforts and tactics is absolutely necessary.

You can earn those links by:

  • Interviewing industry experts and making yourself available to be interviewed, thus positioning yourself as an expert authority. HARO is an incredible resource: Sign up for newsletters for your industry, and respond to pitches. This gets your name out there, and can even act as a plug for your business. If you want to go a step further, sign up as a reporter to pitch queries yourself, and you’ll soon find yourself with industry resources available to you.
  • Doing in-person networking at local events and building relationships that may lead to links. Networking isn’t just for sales staff and job seekers. Meeting others in your industry can bring about partnerships and collaborations. Go to events with an open mind, plenty of ideas, and a helpful spirit, and you may be surprised by the connections that you make. Others are likely willing to help you, if you’re open to it.
  • Joining business and industry organizations, like the Chamber of Commerce, and ensuring that you’re listed in the online member directories. There are many reasons to join your local Chamber of Commerce, including making new connections, receiving publicity for your business, and increasing your credibility. This is possibly the simplest way to make yourself visible in the community, but the more you extend yourself and become involved, the better off your business will be.
  • Updating outdated content and fixing bad backlinks. Where you want to earn links is always going to be a part of your strategy. Moz used competitive analysis to determine ways in which to build links on .gov and .edu sites. If you have information that is relevant and well written, you can help these reputable sites by letting them utilize your information. And if you have a history of bad backlinks, you can use these new, good links to fix your reputation.
  • Creating compelling, relevant content. Links in the right context are still a valuable resource. Your inbound links should connect users to content of quality – YOUR content. By spending significant time and energy on your content, you’ll have content worthy of inbound links from other websites. When you’re truly writing content that’s geared towards your audience, rather than regurgitating bland facts, you’re much more likely to have luck earning links.

 

Although link building has evolved, it still plays an important role in your overall search marketing strategy. With recent algorithm changes at Google, you’ll just have to work a little harder to ensure that your inbound links are contextually relevant, add to a positive user experience, and highlight the high-quality content that you’re providing to your users.

seo wordpress plugins

6 WordPress Plugins for Content Marketers

by SEO Savvy April 8th, 2014

WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for inbound marketing for a wealth of reasons: it makes it easy to produce sites that are both attractive and professional, it provides businesses a content management system (CMS) for blogging, search engines love it, and the platform provides a number of valuable plugins. If you are just getting started with blogging and producing content for your business, these plugins can help with creating and optimizing content. Here are a few plugins to test:

SEO Audit by ContentLook

seo audit for wordpress

Few web surfers go past the first page of search engine results. By some estimates, nearly half of all site traffic comes from search engines. If you are not showing up near the top, you are missing out on valuable traffic. SEO optimization is key.

The SEO Audit plugin helps you quickly ascertain which parts of your site need work and provides actionable tips to improve your site’s position in the search engine results page. Weekly reports show how your content is working over time. The reports can be downloaded as PDFs and also emailed to members of your content marketing team. This plugin helps you assess your success in blogging, traffic, social media, WordPress optimization, SEO, links and authority.

Social by MailChimp

social content marketing

While search engines remain one of the most important sources of traffic, the traffic you get from social networks can be valuable as well. People are more likely to do business with a company that is responsive on sites like Facebook and Twitter. And, referrals from friends are a powerful tool to build trust and authority.

Social is a lightweight plugin that makes it easy for your readers to interact with your content. You can set Social to automatically put links to your posts on Twitter and Facebook. Tweets can be integrated as comments on your entries, and it allows readers to comment under their Facebook identities. Interactions on Facebook are posted as comments, meaning that the conversation can grow in both places. The plugin can be customized to seamlessly fit your WordPress theme.

Squirrly SEO

content marketing

Instant advice and analysis makes this a must-have plugin. This tool gives keyword advice as you type your blog posts, helping you optimize to increase traffic. Headline suggestions help you optimize this important part of your blog. The advice sections help you make content that is better for both search engines and human readers. It also sends weekly reports about your blogging, traffic, SEO, social signals, backlinks and authority. Historical data lets you see your progress toward better content marketing.

Instant Suggest

Frequently updated blogs are one of the keys to success in content marketing. According to HubSpot stats from 2012, 92% of respondents who updated more than once a day acquired customers through their blogs; for those who updated monthly, that figure dropped to 66%. But, it can sometimes be difficult to come up with enough ideas to support constant content creation. Instant Suggest’s Article Suggestion Tool helps by supplying links to blog posts and articles in your industry for inspiration. The plugin also suggests keywords and points out possible phrasing and grammar errors. Auto completion of words and frequently used phrases help save time, too.

InboundWriter

wordpress seo plugin

When people take to search engines, they are frequently looking for information and solutions. If your blog posts and articles offer answers and solutions, those readers are more likely to become your customers. Plus, by directly addressing a reader problem, you are building content that is valuable for the user, which could lead to more traffic and exposure for you company and brand.

Take, for instance, a company that provides lawn care. A prospect that lives in the company’s area might be looking for a solution that affects your local community. They might search Google for something like: “how do I get rid of dollar weed?” If there is an entry on the company blog that addresses the problem and offers professional solutions, it provides a positive emotional connection and builds trust. These ingredients can lead to a loyal business relationship.

While we can learn what questions our potential customers have by asking current customers about their concerns, finding out directly from search queries is even more valuable. InboundWriter a

llows you to see what surfers are searching for when they research your industry and how different search engine results rank. You can enter a phrase and query for results, or just start writing, and the plugin will start automatically making real-time suggestions about 200 words in.

Editorial Assistant by Zemanta

zemanta-seo-plugin

You’ve spent a lot of time curating exceptional content, so when someone ends up on one of your pages, you want them to keep clicking around within your site. Zemanta’s Editorial Assistant allows you to add related posts and images to your posts. Finding your own content to link out to is easy, as Editorial Assistant does the digging, and adds in the proper credit, if necessary. But arguably the coolest aspect of this plugin is a feature called Link Love, which recommends relevant posts from other bloggers to use for citations; and if you have it installed, it’s recommending your posts to others utilizing the tool, too. In other words, you could get exposure for your content without doing any extra work at all.

Your inbound marketing campaigns live and die by the quality of your content. Use these plugins as tools to help improve the quality and reach of your content marketing strategy.

4 Ways to Improve Content Marketing

by SEO Savvy April 3rd, 2014

Search engines can detect when a business creates content of value versus content that is designed solely to capture web traffic. Scalable link building methods and over-optimizing your website by unnaturally stuffing content with keywords is counterproductive, and likely to land you with penalties from Google. Today, effective content marketing is key for successfully building brands, interacting with customers, and selling products.

Two out of every three businesses currently spend more than 25% of their marketing budget on digital marketing, including content marketing, according Accenture’s CMO Insights Study. However, the same study found that while many marketing executives understand the importance of content marketing, they are “unprepared” and “unsure” how to best leverage this marketing technique for maximum success. Without a clear strategy in place, businesses are ineffectively throwing money at content marketing – and hoping something works.

Follow these four tips to get the most out of your content marketing budget:

#1: Be interactive.
Google’s algorithm updates are capable of detecting “interactivity” of content. How does Google determine if your content is meeting this metric? Content that is shared, reblogged, reposted, emailed, retweeted, and commented upon is considered interactive. In other words, you need to figure out how to use social media to your advantage. To increase your content’s reach, be sure that it is relevant to your clients, original, and creative. Don’t rehash old news; make each story your own.

#2: Solve a problem.
In order to improve your content’s interactivity, it is important to understand what drives your target audience to share information. Solving a problem is one of the most basic and important reasons why individuals share information. Rather than making a sales pitch on your blog, provide how-to instructions or tips that address a common problem faced by your clients or customers. Giving away valuable content for free will not only increase the likelihood that your content is shared, but also build your business’s reputation as an industry thought leader. When clients face another problem, they’ll likely turn to your business for a trusted solution.

#3: Be visual.
Content that includes a picture or infographic is more likely to be shared than a text-only blog post. From Pinterest to Instagram, today’s most popular social networks are increasingly based on visuals. Photos increase user interaction on Facebook. Images shared on the popular social network receive 120 percent more engagement than plain text updates, and the latest format changes reflect images as priority. Don’t hide your best information in a sea of words and numbers. Turn old PowerPoint slides and charts into a compelling infographic. Accompany each blog post with a unique or thought-provoking image. When adding images to a blog post, be sure to add keyword metadata to the image for enhanced SEO.

#4: KISS.
This acronym, which dates back to the 1960s, stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. The KISS principle can be applied in many circumstances; for example, when you’re creating a piece of content, you want to keep the format as uncomplicated as possible. This is why lists have become so popular; you’ll grab the attention of your readers with a straightforward title, then keep them hooked with easy-to-read bullet points or numbers, subheadings, and brief paragraphs. Everyone is moving so fast on the Internet, jumping from website to social network to blog, that a simple, formulaic post delivers information most effectively.

Like any good marketing strategy, content marketing requires clear goals and benchmarks for success. Content marketing is also a long-term investment. While your business may not see immediate measurable returns, in the long run, effective content marketing will build your brand and improve customer relationships, two critical goals for your business’s marketing success.

7 Search Results In Google Will Help Brands

by Mark Hawks August 22nd, 2012

For years, search engine optimization companies, online marketing professionals and small business owners have worked to figure out exactly how to get the best rankings within Google search engine results. And for the longest time, people have been used to receive 10 organic results in Google search engine result pages, or SERPs, per keyword.  Last week, that number has dropped down to 7 results in Google SERPs and it appears that along with this change, it has become easier for one site to crowd the results, according to Search Engine Land.  7 results are mostly showing for brand name related searches at this point, which should delight those that have been hurt by negative reviews showing up in SERPs when doing a search for their name.

Notable Changes in SERPs in August 2012

  • The changes appear to have happened on or around August 16, when online chatter about the changes boosted dramatically. According to Search Engine Land, a simple search for eBay now brought up seven results instead of the traditional 10 SERPs.
  • Dr. Pete at SEOMoz has been tracking fluctuations in Google SERPs and upon hearing word of the changes, did a data sampling of many different SERPs. His findings concluded that about 20 percent of SERPs were below 10 results. The number had previously been 3-4 percent, and spiked dramatically the week of August 16.
  • It has not been determined if the SERP changes will be restricted to brands, as some SERPs of non-brand items and generic search terms are also displaying only 7 results. Search Engine Land noted that it does appear to be directly related to sitelinks, or the number of expanded links from one site that appear underneath a listing on the search result page.
  • Search Engine Land also notes that as the SERPs have decreased down to 7 results on the first page, there seems to be a simultaneous rise in all of those results coming from the same website. SEL states that it does appear to be related to the change, although they could not confirm it.

Google has previously stated that it intends to work on search results related to site links and site clustering, so one might assume that this change is related to those statements. Search Engine Land did contact Google for a response to the obvious data changes and appearance changes in regards to the SERPs. Google administrators said that it was indeed working on tweaking the way searchers see results, stating that the search engine giant is constantly looking for ways to improve results for viewers. Sometimes this means giving them a variety of different websites about a given topic, while other times it might mean giving searchers a deeper look into the specific topic they are looking at.

7 organic results for a brand search is a cleaner experience when Google can decipher the intent is indeed for that brand.  It doesn’t appear to have helped searches for those who have an exact match keyword domain name. We’ll see how this plays out.

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